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baby girl

hooray for Lily

Since moving to Texas six years ago,
I’ve been very fortunate to find a small group of
neighborhood friends to go through parenthood with me. In our
neighborhood we have seven other families with children almost
exactly Maddie and Cora’s ages; moms who tolerate my
crunchiness and willingly watch my kids when I have a babysitting
crisis; and dads who like to play rock music and video games as
much as Brian does. This core group is very dear to me: the
children are rock solid besties with my kids, and will never leave
each other out, and I know my gal pals ALWAYS have my back.

Yes, we are all super close. And yet my children know they are not
EVER allowed to get into a car with one of those dads unless
there’s someone else in the car, too.

We’ve been talking over the past
week about the breakfast dilemma: namely, how to get a hot, filling
meal on the table without getting up at the crack of dawn on a
school day. Last week I gave you the recipe for homemade (and fast,
once they’re pre-made!) egg mcmuffins, and today I give you
another egg-based recipe – the egg pancake.

This is high on protein and super-low on difficulty. It’s not
a crepe-like pancake, but a thick, hearty one. This recipe makes
one egg pancake, which the girls will split most mornings along
with a glass of juice and perhaps a slice of banana bread; if
they’re super-hungry the girls might eat a whole one for
lunch, for example.

My grandmother gave this recipe to my mom, who passed it on to me,
so forgive the fact that there are no exact measurements here. And
there are only three ingredients: egg, cottage cheese, and
flour.

We’re talking about how to get a
hot, filling breakfast on the table in fifteen minutes or less.
Today’s the first installment, and while it’s not under
fifteen minutes prep time, it’s waay less than that in the
morning, so here goes.

I’m a big believer in cooking ahead – I try to double a
recipe and freeze half, or spend one morning every couple of weeks
preparing a few big meals. I also like to cook ahead – do
some prep work – on the weekend to get ready for the coming
week: I love serving good meals, but hate pulling them together in
the evening.

Same goes for mornings.

So for our breakfast mcmuffins – and these are a favorite of
my husband’s – I do all the work ahead of time and all
you do in the morning is assemble.

All this week Maddie’s been doing
some standardized testing in school – the things we hate but
have to go through to keep our state funding. And every night when
Maddie has me sign her homework folder, I see where it says in big
letters: GET TO BED EARLY TONIGHT. EAT A GOOD BREAKFAST TOMORROW
MORNING.

And Maddie has said, anxiously, “I need to eat a good
breakfast tomorrow!” To which I reply, “Maddie, you
always eat a good breakfast.”

‘Tis the season for colds and flus
and allergies, and I find myself hovering around Defcon Three
sometimes in my hyper-alertness for signs of sniffles and such.

We weathered Cora’s case of the croup remarkably well last
week, using only natural home remedies and getting her back on her
feet super fast. And having remedies on hand to help treat an
illness is great- but having something on hand TO MAKE SURE YOU
DON’T GET SICK IN THE FIRST PLACE is even better.

We do a few different things here: first, we take natural vitamins
that are pretty much just dehydrated fruits and vegetables. We
don’t take them all year long, since we eat a ton of produce
– both fruits and veggies – when we’re making
smoothies multiple times a day. But when the weather turns cold
somehow an ice-cold strawberry/blackberry smoothie just
doesn’t hit the spot. So our vitamin regime starts back
up.